


the care and maintenance of a heart in ten easy steps

by lifeincantos



Category: Carmilla (Web Series), Carmilla - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Gen, Introspection, Mentions of Blood, Unexpected Feels, alternate title: the life and times of matska belmonde in ten snapshots, alternatively constructed prose, death cw, mattie centric, mentions of f/f relationships, non romantic love, season finale spoilers, slight emetophobia cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-02
Updated: 2015-10-02
Packaged: 2018-04-24 11:54:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4918540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lifeincantos/pseuds/lifeincantos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Human hearts are bloody things wrapped in beautiful words. </p>
<p>Or: Matska Belmonde dies many deaths, none of them too consequential when you live for twelve hundred years. She takes care of her heart along the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the care and maintenance of a heart in ten easy steps

**1.** Hearts are bloody things wrapped in beautiful words. A thousand years after you are born, some man sits at desk and writes: 

                               i carry your heart (  _i carry it in my heart_  ) 

A thousand and some odd years before he is born, you look at the same sun he did, and you breathe with your human lungs and taste the cold, burning air of the Bulgarian Empire in its golden age. In what they say is its golden age. You have never seen gold except in the sunrise, but as it crests over the hills and kisses the horizon your heart trembles.  

You think of beautiful girls and beautifuller stories and you breathe for a decade or two and every thing you see (and smell and taste and hold and hear) sends your heart racing because you have so  _little_  time and there is so much world and it thrills you to know that there are mysteries you will never solve. You are clever and sure and kind. You don’t want to know everything. You just want the sunrise to warm your bloody human heart. 

**2.** You die in blood. Your heart stops. 

**3.** You wake up, and your heart starts beating again. But it’s just a memory, because you don’t need it. The world is smaller and you are larger than it. You’ve outgrown your bones and your teeth and your murder all in one night, but your heart hasn’t gotten the memo that you’ve been unceremoniously plucked from the world of the living and you don’t need the circulation of blood to keep you awake any longer. 

It doesn’t know, so it keeps beating anyway. 

You let it, because you are changed but you are not Changed. You are you. A girl. Dead, then alive, but you watch the same sunrise and you try not to think about blood,  _about_  blood, think about blood think 

**4.** It takes you a week to pass from undead to monster, and it leaves you dizzy. It leaves you staggering a dark street made of dirt and stone, listening as the rocks echo laughter that sounds and tastes like falling ash. Ash and blood, sweet blood, sweet ichor, sweet sutures that bind your soul to you. 

You try to vomit, but that’s a human thing. You don’t know if you even can anymore. You don’t want to find out. You never wanted to know everything – not the cruel things, even when you had to learn. Even when you saved your own life time and again only to fail in the worst way. Only to die. 

If you are truly not human anymore, you don’t want to know. 

But when you sit against the warm facade of a house, bathed in moonlight, you don’t cry. You are made of stronger stuff than that. You just hold your heart ( _hold your heart_ ) and breathe. 

**5.** When the day comes that you’ve been dead longer than you’ve been alive, you mark it. Mother laughs at your drawn expression, asks why you’re so stricken all of a sudden. You don’t tell her. You try to remember what it felt like to have your heart stop altogether. But that day does not exist in your mind – you can’t remember, and as if to distract you this undead heart keeps ceaselessly, stubbornly, beating. 

**6.** In time you live double your human lifespan. Triple. Your heart keeps beating, you stop counting. Between each beat, a century passes. People come and go. Humans come and go. Mother sets up shop in a little town on the Arabic Mediterranean because it is the height of culture and she refuses to miss out on the world’s pulse. She has never stopped in her pursuit to be where life is and you follow. You talk to many. You bring them to your room, and to some you even say: 

"There is something you do not know about me."

"What is it?" They ask. 

"Something dark." Your eyes glitter. 

"Dark?"

"And dangerous." You smile. They smile. Yours is hard like the diamonds you sometimes wear. You let them touch your still beating heart, and you whisper your secrets into their eyes. The both of you are done up in kohl and rouge but even though you are both pretty girls, you can’t help but feel that when you gaze into her eyes, you can’t see very far. Her depths are so close to the surface. Her blood is sweet and thin and throbs in her papery veins. 

_She will be gone, soon_ , some sudden, intrusive voice tells you. 

_I’m just having fun_ , you silently reply. 

The two of you watch the same sunset and the same moonrise, and she touches your arm and acts like she’s never seen it before. That she’s never been so enamored before. How silly. (  _ ~~how true~~_. ) 

You have watched the same sun for five hundred years. 

You don’t remember her name. 

You listen to her heartbeat until she falls asleep under Egyptian silk, then you leave. 

**7.** You try to remember your human memories. You  _try_  to remember. You try toremember. 

You don’t, you skip a beat, you move on. 

(  **7.5**   The spell to take your heart out is so easy that it nearly makes you cry when you think about the moments when you used to fantasize about death. About undoing the Monstrous thing that is your second life. 

Mother says a few words, and it feels like sleeping. 

"That was very practical," she says evenly, with that glassy smile of hers. "We’ll be late for the party in Versailles, darling."

In the end, it was only one moment in a thousand years of living. It was only an addendum. The thought might make you sad, if you weren’t such a practical girl. ) 

**8.** The ball is nothing like grand parades on the banks of the Nile or the raucous celebrations of life at the edge of the unknown world, but you like dancing. And you like seeing mother happy, and you’re curious when she brings the dark, glittering girl to you. 

"This is your new sister," Mother says. You can’t remember if you ever had a sister before. You don’t know how you’re supposed to feel. 

But she’s not papery, not thin, not insubstantial as so much fog on a winter’s morning. Her heart beats just like yours. Just like no one else’s except yours.

"Is she staying with us?" You ask breezily. 

"For a long while," Mother replies. 

"I hope she can keep up." 

Your sister says nothing. For a year or two she is The Girl. You pretend not to hear her stuttering inhale, you pretend you do not feel your body respond in kind from the other side of the wall – remembering what it’s like to cross the threshold to monster more clearly than you can remember the humans that birthed you. It’s so long ago but you push that away, you force yourself to forget, to think about something else. To throw a stone across the pond in your mind and follow it until you don’t think about how you studied in the library of Timbuktu and wanted to wail and shatter when it was destroyed. How you want to wail knowing every human who had ever touched one of those books was killed not by Turkish slavers, but by the slowly creeping hands of time. 

"Mircalla," you ask her when some more of that time has passed. "Have you ever been to the opera in Paris?"

She hasn’t. She wants to go with you, so you go there together. You watch the performance, you watch the light glint off of the diamonds and silks of the singers, and then you watch the light of the emerging stars outside. 

( You –  _together_. Not you –  _alone_. ) 

When you rise in the morning, she is there. 

She asks: "Have you ever been to Morocco?"

"Why do you ask?"

"I’d just like to know."

You tell her about Morocco and Spain and Tibet, and you realize after a while that you are telling her your stories. Stories that have never felt the coolness of the air because they have never been uttered before. 

It dawns on you that these are secrets. Real secrets. 

She listens with her limitless dark eyes and claws and teeth as dangerous as yours and you feel safe. 

You also realize that you’ve never felt safe before. 

The world opens before you two. You twine your fingers together as you gaze upon Pompeii, and attend open salons with Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges, and hold your collective breath as you watch the grainy television and hear them say that humans have touched the stars. 

You have seen things that would dazzle the human imagination: the odd creatures of the galapagos, the explorers of the Mediterranean discovering new lands, the sphinx. This fuzzy, newfangled, black and white picture box cannot hope to convey with the same clarity what you’ve seen. Like how the model of the Mona Lisa looked under the moonlight, flushed and pale and so achingly beautiful years before she was immortalized by Leonardo. 

"This is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

But you tremble, because for one moment the world is large again. You turn to Mircalla, you take in the sight of her wide eyes and her parted lips and your forcibly shattered heart trembles as well when you realize that you love her. 

**9.** The irony is that when you die again it’s the same as everything else: an addendum, a fuzzy memory; an incidental, overlooked work of human interference. There is pain ( _shrill pain_  that rattles your bones) and then it’s just a puff of smoke. You’re confused and your senses have dimmed to the point where you feel –  _human_  – again – 

And you’re upset but not terribly so. You can’t be, because it feels so nice. To die in the arms of someone who will outlive you. To be  _outlived_  at all. 

You were a practical girl, to carve your heart out and carry it not in your heart. 

**10.** You wake up as a bloody thing without any beautiful words. 

You have always known what to do.

You do not know what to do. 

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr! http://womeninthesequel.tumblr.com


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